Sunday, June 05, 2005

How to start a startup

  • If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.
  • It would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.
  • http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
  • Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them.
  • For the angel to have someone to make the check out to, you're going to have to have some kind of company. Merely incorporating yourselves isn't hard. The problem is, for the company to exist, you have to decide who the founders are, and how much stock they each have. If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business, that's easy. But if you have a number of people who are expected to contribute in varying degrees, arranging the proportions of stock can be hard. And once you've done it, it tends to be set in stone.
  • There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS.
  • It can be dangerous to delay turning yourself into a company, because one or more of the founders might decide to split off and start another company doing the same thing. This does happen. So when you set up the company, as well as as apportioning the stock, you should get all the founders to sign something agreeing that everyone's ideas belong to this company, and that this company is going to be everyone's only job.
  • Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history.
  • Build something users love, and spend less than you make.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Dave's Next Move

Dave Duffield (PeopleSoft founder) has come back to business world with his next move.

http://www.davesnextmove.com

Rightly said -

Today’s enterprise applications are no longer meeting the needs of their customers.
These applications

• Are too expensive to deploy and maintain.

• Are complicated and difficult to use.

The challenge is to balance the two contradictory facets of enterprise applications - ease of use (ease of deployment) and feature richness.